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Monthly Archive for June, 2009

Have a top of the line device but your heart belongs to the look of your good ‘ol 8700? See the new look of the Dimension theme with the latest and brightest smartphone displays on the market.

JLDesigns Head Developer Jake had this to say about this new old theme: “I wanted to let you know about another series of themes that I have that I think you might be really interested in! It’s called the Dimension Series, and is for the Bold and 8900. As I’m sure you know, all newer generation BlackBerry smartphones come loaded with just the Precision themes. While nice, many users miss the look and feel of the old default Dimension themes. I created these themes using the original fonts, icons, pictures, and styles for the Bold and 8900, and they all look great! There are four different versions: Zen, Today, L, and Bottom Dock.”

Erik VanDrunen of RIM public relations had this to say about micro-USB: “A number of industry associations have endorsed micro-USB as a preferred charging standard, including the CTIA (in April 2009). RIM is committed to micro-USB as an industry standard because it’s smaller than mini-USB and supports the trend to thinner smartphones, without sacrificing features or capabilities.

EnGadgetMobile’s Thomas Ricketer on the current state of mobile chargers in Europe: “phone chargers, at the moment some 30 different types of chargers are used on handsets throughout Europe. Today, the European Commission received industry backing of its phone charger standard that relies on a micro-USB socket. The standard is now backed by all the majors (representing 90% of the European mobile market) including Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Apple, LG, NEC, Qualcomm, Research in Motion, Samsung and Texas Instruments with compatible devices starting to appear in Europe next year. Or course, the micro-USB charger standard already has the blessings of CTIA, OMTP, and GSM Association, which implies a broader adoption beyond Europe, someday. One charger for any mobile phone… where’s the catch?”

It seems that like mini-USB before it, RIM working to make sure that the BlackBerry data transfer and changing cable remain ubiquitous.

French 2d barcode company Mobile Tag announced new Mobile Tag barcode reading software for BlackBerry. The software uses the BlackBerry Bold’s video recording features to actively sample the barcode and process the tag’s info. Other BlackBerry models use their camera feature and require the user to “snap” a barcode scan. Contact tags are used to securely exchange contact info. Web tags are used for promotion from billboards, magazines and web pages, providing more info, and even managing virtual coupons.

Congratulations to gwabbit on becoming the number 1 paid app for the 4th straight week on BlackBerry App World’s Professional and Business category.

gwabbit is an automatic email contact management (ECM) solution. The app automatically searches and identifies contacts embedded in emails on your BlackBerry, and adds or updates that information to your BlackBerry Contacts, in a single click. For those users syncing their contacts to Outlook, gwabbit’s automated capture keeps contacts updated globally.

gwabbit for Outlook automatically identifies signatures in incoming emails and creates them as new or updated contacts in your address book.

AmazingMail.com Inc.’s online Web-to-print service allows smartphone application developers to integrate on-demand printing services to send personalized mail directly from smartphones – including the ability to spontaneously send postcards composed from “in-the-moment” BlackBerry photos – and get the card in the mail the next business day.

“We’re excited to talk to developers from BlackBerry and other smartphone communities about how they can use our patented batch processing and limitless digital print capability to build exciting mail and marketing applications for industry verticals,” says AmazingMail.com’s CEO Chris Lynde. “Postino and PicCard are good examples of how developers can generate margins of 100% or more with our Web-to-print engine.” Also, Postino is poised to launch a Windows Mobile version and BlackBerry version – evidence that the AmazingMail web-to-print application is of use to smartphone developers of all types.

This service sounds like a great summer vacation tool; not to mention an ideal Hallmark Killer.